Monday, July 22 2013

Monday, July 22 2013

Classes offer firsthand experience of the entire pottery-making cycle. Beginning emphasis is placed on working with one of the fifteen potter's wheels. Beginning as well as advanced students are welcome. Sets of eight week classes are offered Tuesday or Thursday evening 6 to 9 p.m., year-round. Sign up now to reserve your place.

Call or go to the website for more information. 860-528-6090, www.greenleafpottery.net

Victorian era gadgets, technologies and breakthroughs will be on display at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum beginning April 17th through October 6, 2013. What Is It? Technologies and Discoveries of the Victorian Era will engage student and adult audiences in the exploration of mid-to-late 19th century inventions and discoveries in many diverse areas including communication, transportation, manufacturing, medicine, food and recreation.

Visitors will view cutting-edge Victorian Era technology that were precursors of some of today’s technologies, including telegraphs, dictaphones, gas lighting and early examples of telephones, burglar alarms, stock tickers and much more. They will discover items we still see today, from board games to food such as condensed milk and breakfast cocoa. Artifacts on display include loans from Connecticut's Mattatuck Museum and the Museum of American Finance, New York City, among others.

The What Is It? exhibit is curated by Raechel Guest. Guest is a Smith College graduate with a Master’s Degree in Collection Management from the prestigious Winterthur Museum. Professor Steven Lubar, a history of technology expert, serves as a special advisor. Professor Lubar is Professor of the Departments of American Studies, History, and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University.

The exhibit is made possible thanks to a grant from the Connecticut Humanities (CTH), a non-profit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities that funds, creates and collaborates on hundreds of cultural programs across Connecticut each year. CTH brings together people of all ages and backgrounds to express, share and explore ideas in thoughtful and productive ways. From local discussion groups to major exhibitions on important historical events, CTH programs engage, enlighten and educate. Learn more by visiting www.cthumanities.org.

The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum’s 2013 cultural and educational programs are made possible by generous funding from the LMMM Distinguished Benefactors: The Xerox Foundation, Klaff’s, Mrs. Cynthia C. Brown and The Maurice Goodman Foundation. The Museum’s Education Program is made possible in part by a generous donation from AT&T.

Tours for the museum and exhibit are offered Wednesdays through Sundays, at noon, 1 p.m., 2 p.m., and 3 p.m.

Franklin Street Works is proud to present Kool-Aid Wino, a group exhibition curated by Brooklyn-based writer and critic Claire Barliant. The exhibition explores the foregrounding of mistakes and missteps in contemporary art practices and features works by Anne Carson, Choi Dachal, Frank Heath, Owen Land, Rotem Linial, James Merrill, Alice Miceli, Jenny Perlin, Aki Sasamoto, as well as an ikat silk suzani made in the early twenties. It is on view at Franklin Street Works from July 20 – September 22 with a free, public reception on July 20 from 5:00 – 8:00 pm. There will be a performance by Aki Sasamoto during the reception, beginning at 7:00 pm.

The show starts with the widely accepted premise that artistic process relies on trial and error. You try something, you mess up, you move on. But what if you stay with that mistake, or that troubling passage, and make it the focus? What if you let it be awkward, an irritant, wiggle it like a loose tooth or pick at it like a scab that never quite heals? What if, instead of being one (quickly deleted) step toward success or resolution, the error becomes the climax and the denouement—an end point in itself, or even a goal? Hence the title Kool-Aid Wino, which comes from Trout Fishing in America by poet and author Richard Brautigan, who deliberately fudged words while writing in order to invent new ways of saying things.

The artists in Kool-Aid Wino poke and prod at systems—be they technological, linguistic, musical, or administrative—until they find or create a chink or flaw that sheds light on the whole. Jenny Perlin’s three-channel video projection, Sight Reading, presents three different pianists on each screen, each struggling to play a composition they are seeing for the first time. Choi Dachal’s photographs feature dress shirts that have been pressed, cleaned, and folded. Yet on close inspection, they prove to be two different shirts with slightly varying patterns that have been buttoned together and folded to look like a single shirt. Owen Land, Rotem Linial, and Alice Miceli take a reflexive approach to film and photography, revealing and reveling in glitches and mechanical failures. Frank Heath and Aki Sasamoto disassemble objects to point out ruptures in systems such as urbanism and history that, while abstract, are often deemed airtight and error-proof.

Errors, as Freud demonstrated in his writings on parapraxis (slips of the tongue), often tip others off to our secret aversions or buried desires, which we strenuously try to conceal. By highlighting or even celebrating errors, the art works in Kool-Aid Wino redeem flaws, accentuate their value, and open up myriad new possibilities. The last line of the pseudonymous chapter in Brautigan’s book reads: “He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.” In a sense, each of the artists in this show creates his or her own Kool-Aid reality. Cumulatively the works remind us that uniqueness relies on flaws and our imaginative negotiation in, around, and through them. It is also worth noting that Trout Fishing in America famously ends with the word “mayonaise,” a typo that may not have been intentional, but made it into the final draft.

One of the most distinguished local collections of prints has been assembled by Dr. Dorrance T. Kelly. While his collection has been comprised primarily of American twentieth-century prints and prints by John James Audubon, in recent years he has also collected Old Master and nineteenth-century works extensively.

These encompass splendid sheets by the great German printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528), including a rare etching, woodcuts, and engravings of such iconic images as his Nemesis of 1502.

Dr. Kelly's Dutch prints include several of the rare engravings after the influential Adam Elsheimer (1574 - 1610) by Hendrik Goudt (1583 - 1648), and no less than twenty-eight images by the highly experimental printmaker Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 - 1669), ranging from early works of the 1630s to mature impressions from the 1650s.

Completing the collection is a group of etched cityscapes and figure studies by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 - 1903). Together the collection attests to the quality of some of the greatest printmakers in Western Art.

The Eastern Connecticut Symphony concert series begins the New Year on Saturday, January 11, 2014, at 8 PM at the GardeArtsCenter. ECSO Music Director, Toshi Shimada, conducts a program which features, Hyewon Kim, winner of the 2013 ECSO Instrumental Competition, performing Elgar’s Cello Concerto, sponsored by Chelsea Groton Bank. The audience members will also hear Sibelius Karelia Suite and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No, 2, (the Little Russian.) Pre-concert conversation at 7 PM with Gary Chapman; post-concert reception free for members of the audience. Tickets are priced from $32-$62 with senior and student tickets in selected seating areas. Call the ECSO office at 860-443-2876 or purchase them on the Internet at: www.gardearts.org. For further information, visit the ECSO website at: www.ectsymphony.com or friend us on Face Book.